Do you want to become more socially skilled and create better relationships? Do you worry about how others perceive you? Do you sometimes feel insecure in social situations and wish you were better at handling conflict?
Then this is the right book for you.
Read about how you can understand yourself and others even better and come closer to your friends, colleagues, and partner. To do that, you need to use your hidden social ability. You already have it, you just may not know it yet.
Det handlar om mentalisering, an innate ability that few people are aware of and rarely use in everyday social life. When you mentalize, you see yourself from the outside and others from the inside. Research shows that your capacity for mentalization determines how well you succeed in social interaction. The best part is that it can be trained.
In the book, Jacqueline Joo explains what mentalization is and gives you concrete tools both for how to think and act in social situations and for how to avoid the tricky pitfalls we all easily fall into.
Read a sample of the first part of the book beside or above this section. Click the image.
Research shows that your mentalization ability is crucial for how well you succeed in social interaction. Mentalization is a THINKING TOOL and means being able to see yourself from the outside and others from the inside. Understanding yourself more deeply, and being able to put yourself in other people's perspectives, is a key to building good relationships.
Too often we judge ourselves and others, worry about what others think of us, and treat our own thoughts and feelings as truth without exploring whether they actually match reality.
This puts us in many uncomfortable social situations that can easily lead to misunderstandings or conflict. With the help of mentalization, you can not only improve your self-understanding but also create better relationships because you can mentalize about both yourself and other people.
Mentalization is a powerful tool that benefits all of us. Jacqueline's book on the subject is both personal and easy to read, and I highly recommend it.
If you do not understand who you are, why your life looks the way it does, and what you want, it is difficult to create good and genuine relationships. What really drives your behaviour? How aware are you of how your thought patterns and feelings affect you? And what do you believe you control in your life versus what you leave to chance?
When you mentalize about yourself in the moment, you pause and ask yourself: why am I thinking, feeling, and acting this way right now?
If the first step in the mentalization process is learning to understand yourself, the next step is understanding how others perceive you. You do this by stepping outside yourself and looking at your own behaviour from the outside, from other people's perspectives. In that way, you can also increase your self-awareness.
Knowing exactly how others perceive you is impossible, however, and not something you can control. Everyone you meet will perceive you differently based on their own unique history.
Seeing others from the inside, meaning trying to understand others by putting yourself in their perspective, is very little about certainty and much more about informed guesses. We cannot read other people's minds, nor can we know exactly what they want, feel, or need.
But you can play with the idea of stepping into their bodies and imagining a story that may help you understand why they behave the way they do.
In that way, you can not only develop your capacity for empathy but also create distance from other people's behaviour and stop taking their actions personally.